Cooperative control and the governance of cross-border trade in Chinese border cities

One essential question in the literature on trade governance concerns the relationship between state and non-state actors. This paper addresses the question by focusing on how the Chinese state deploys a strategy of cooperative control to govern cross-border trade with Myanmar. We identify three terrains of trade affairs – traffic flows, cross-border payment and anti-smuggling – which correspond to three modes of governance – active cooperation, acquiescence and compromise. It is found that the more the Chinese state cooperates to facilitate cross-border trade with Myanmar, the harder its unilateral crackdown on smuggling, showing the coordinative and coercive nature of state power to selectively cooperate with other actors. In the domain of cross-border trade, the Chinese state exercises cooperative control to forge network governance not in response to market dysfunction and state failure, but to overcome structural conditions brought by the territorial border between China and Myanmar. By analysing cooperative control at the border, this paper’s contribution is to overcome the government versus governance dualism, and shed light on innovative strategies in spatial and administrative orchestration aiming to facilitate legal trade and deter illegal trade at the border.